A national cautionary tale: Russian women newcomers to Israel portrayed*

This article focuses on portrayals of recent women migrants from the (former) Soviet Union in Israel, as these found expression in jokes and in articles in the press. Analysis of these portrayals suggests that the ubiquitous association of the newcomer women with prostitution served to construct them as morally and socially fragmented. Loosened from the moral bounds of familial and, by implication, national ties, the newcomer women were located beyond the boundary of the Israeli Jewish collective. As the mirror image of the ‘loose’ newcomer women, mother-like, Israeli Jewish women were seen as eminently suited to the task of ‘domesticating’ the newcomers – bringing them in from the street into the familial, and national, home. The discussion suggests that the portrayals of the women as prostitutes served as ‘national cautionary tales’, which not only instructed their audience (newcomers and oldtimers alike) in fundamental tenets of Israeli Jewish national identity, but also warned those who might seek to undermine the ethno-national attachments and loyalties that lie at the heart of the Israeli polity.     

Raising the dead: war,memory and American national identity*

Abstract. The dead, particularly the war dead, play a central role in the development of nationalism, nowhere more so than in America. America's mid‐nineteenth century Civil War produced a recognisable and influential ‘cult of the dead’, comparable in its construction with similar developments in Europe following World War I. Focused on the figure of the fallen soldier, especially the volunteer soldier, this cult found physical expression in the development of national cemeteries devoted not just to the burial of those who fell in the war but to the idea of America as a nation, in the development of monuments to the dead that, again, reinforced the new national symbolism of the war era, and in the beginnings of Memorial Day, an American sacred ceremony with clear parallels with the later Armistice Day ceremonies in Europe. In all these developments, America preceded the European nations by several decades, making America a valuable case study for the role that the cult of the fallen soldier plays in national development more generally.     

The bi‐national idea in Israel/Palestine: past and present

Abstract. This article reviews four different advocacies of bi‐nationalism in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Despite the differences in their context, content and style, let alone in motivations and implications, the four advocacies – the ‘old school’ and the ‘new school’ of Jewish bi‐nationalism, contemporary Palestinian bi‐nationalism, and bi‐nationalist advocacy that comes from outside observers – present certain similarities which reduce their chances of becoming a mainstream option: (a) in all cases bi‐nationalism is not the most desirable option; (b) they all gained momentum on both sides in periods of instability – due to transformations in the power relations between them or when the conflict reaches a point where the violence seems to become unbearable; (c) all these bi‐nationalisms present a rather uneasy mixture of moralistic arguments and pragmatic ones; (d) in all cases the people who embrace the bi‐national model are intellectuals. This gives their recommendations a touch of ‘ivory tower’ overrationalisation, further reducing thier public appeal.     

Sub specie mortis: Ruthenian and Russian last judgement icons compared

This article deals with the iconography of the sixteenth–eighteenth century Orthodox Last Judgements. The vertical and horizontal hierarchies of its composition that are fairly standard still leave much room for local preferences and innovations. Using the Ruthenian icons as cases in point and Russian exemplars as controls, the author attempts to discern similarities and differences and to identify, where possible, the sources of change. In the focus of analysis are three compositional elements of the Last Judgement iconography, i.e. ordeals (mytarstva), images of death, and the figure of the Alms Giving Fornicator. The article concentrates on the meaning of its presence vs. absence, placement and typological selection. It allows conclusions to be made about the influence of the Union of Brest (1596) on the shifts in religious mentalities and the reasons for artistic change.     

Public and private: national identities in a Scottish Borders community*

Abstract. This paper is an exploration of national identities among sports people in a community in the Scottish Borders. This group experiences a split in their identities. Publicly, they are ascribed an ambiguous national identity by the surrounding national communities. Privately, and among fellow community members, they unambiguously assert national identity. This paper examines the way this split is managed, arguing that the performance of public ambiguity is expected, but is supported by the private performance of nationality. National identity is analysed specifically as a performance, and sport is the context in which this performance takes place.     

The Jacobinism and patriotism of Ernest Belfort Bax

This article examines Ernest Belfort Bax's interpretation of the French Revolution and traces the impact that his idea of the Revolution had on his philosophy and his political thought. The first section considers Bax's understanding of the Revolution in the context of his theory of history and analyses his conception of the Revolution's legacy, drawing particularly on his portraits of Robespierre, Marat and Babeuf. The second section shows how the lessons Bax drew from this history shaped his socialist republicanism and discusses his support for Jacobin methods of revolutionary change. The third section of the article looks at the ways in which Bax's reading of revolutionary history affected his internationalism and shows how his ‘anti-patriotism’ led him to support the Anglo-French campaign in 1914. I argue that the Bax's understanding of the French Revolution gave body to his philosophy and greatly influenced his understanding of the socialist struggle. Bax believed that socialists had history on their side, but was so emboldened by the idea of the Revolution that he was led to advance a view of socialist change that undermined the historic values that socialism was supposed to enshrine.     

English and French national identity: comparisons and contrasts*

ABSTRACT. The English and the French are both former imperial peoples, and to that extent they share certain features of national identity common to peoples who have had empires. That includes a ‘missionary’ sense of themselves, a feeling that they have, or have had, a purpose in the world wider than the concerns of non‐imperial nations. I argue that nevertheless the English and the French have diverged substantially in their self‐conceptions. This I put down to a differing experience of empire, the sense especially among the French that the British were more successful in their imperial ventures. I also argue that contrasting domestic histories – evolutionary in the English case, revolutionary in that of the French – have also significantly coloured national identities in the two countries. These factors taken together, I argue, have produced a more intense sense of nationhood and a stronger national consciousness among the French than among the English.     

From sedition to patriotism: performance, place, and the reinterpretation of American ethnic identity

Between the two World Wars, many Americans changed their attitudes toward ethnic minorities and their place within American civic culture. States such as Wisconsin, with its dense concentration of diverse immigrant groups, came under especially harsh fire during the Great War, only to be celebrated 20 years later as microcosms of a pluralist democracy. Although much has been written about this profound transformation of American ethnic identity from the perspective of «official culture», or those governing élites in power, less is known about the role of immigrant communities themselves in this change. Examination of the intertwining of ideology with the social manifestations of cultural performance in one Wisconsin community provides a way to interpret the elusive experience of ordinary people. In the case of two interwar Swiss American cultural performances, a view of ethnic culture emerges that sought to refashion a more inclusive definition of what it meant to be American. In the process of redefining their own identity, third generation Swiss strategically used such performance-based memory work. Their efforts not merely reflected, but shaped a discourse of ethnicity between the wars that became decreasingly antagonistic and gradually more open to ethnic and cultural difference.     

Episteme,nation‐builders and national identity: the re‐construction of Irishness*

Abstract. There are many disagreements among the three main paradigms of the nationalism literature. Yet most modernists, ethno‐symbolists and constructivists agree that elites play a key role in inventing and re‐inventing nations. Notwithstanding this insight, none of these schools of thought has generated a compelling answer to the question of why the inventors of a certain nation build, out of an infinite number of possibilities, a particular nationness. Analysing the case of twentieth century Irish identity, this article seeks to shed light on this question by inquiring into the process through which elites come to imagine the nation that they seek to build. I argue that epistemic understandings of the world delineate which kinds of national identity are conceivable for, and plausible to, nation‐building elites.     

Reading between the lines: national identity and attitudes to the media in Scotland*

ABSTRACT. The relationship between national identity and how people perceive and consume media is a central but largely untested assumption of studies of nationalism. Using a previously developed classification of identity among English migrants to Scotland, this paper explores associations between how people use the media and how they make sense of their national identity. Compared with Scottish nationals, who tend to adopt a more taken‐for‐granted and uncontentious view of the media, except when they feel that the media presented to them challenge their sense of identity, English migrants find that the agendas of the media in Scotland differ from those they are used to south of the border. Specifically, how they view the media tends to vary according to whether they view themselves as ‘English’, ‘British’ or as ‘becoming Scottish’.     

Creating meanings and traps: competing interpretations of the idea of nation in the debates of Russian Slavophiles and Westernisers in the 1840s

To use Benedict Anderson's metaphor, there are different ways to ‘imagine’ the nation. This means that in the same community there might be various competing interpretations of ‘an idea of nation’. They contribute to some kind of ‘repertoire of meanings’, to which participants of nationalist discourses consciously or unconsciously appeal. If so, it is useful to explore the process of shaping and interaction of competing interpretations of ‘an idea of nation’, resulting in (terminal) domination of particular cohesions of meanings in the public discourses. This article offers a case study of the debates between Russian Slavophiles and Westernisers in the 1840s that are treated as the controversy between two distinct models of ‘an idea of nation’, the conservative-traditionalist and the liberal-progressivist. This distinction, familiar for many countries, was especially evident in Russia with regard to the problem of the preservation of ‘the national self’ in the context of ‘catch-up’ modernisation which took a significant place amongst the complex of issues that shaped the nationalist ‘repertoire of meanings’.